


between the lines (longitudes and latitudes)

by locomotive



Category: Produce 101 (TV), X1 (Korea Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Assassins & Hitmen, Assassins & Hitmen, M/M, Organized Crime, can be read as a oneshot, might continue this but as always i dont follow through on these promises very well
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-15
Updated: 2019-09-15
Packaged: 2020-10-18 23:44:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20647667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/locomotive/pseuds/locomotive
Summary: the job never stops.isaiah 48:22 “there is no rest for the wicked.”





	between the lines (longitudes and latitudes)

_ 25 & counting  _

_ “You’re making good progress Cho Seungyoun-sshi, 50 and you’re free to do whatever. I hope you’re worth it.” _

_ Zurich 2014. _

It’s where he first meets Seungwoo. He’d almost forgotten the caliginosity from the time before. 

The crystal chandeliers catch the bright lights of the room, a spotting of light flickers, interspersed throughout the foyer. It intermingles like a martyr amongst the darkness the partygoers below exude. Other intricate ornaments hang atop the wide expanses of the ballroom ceiling almost dripping a tangible arrogance from the exuberance. Let there be light, the Lord had said.  _ Was he even here anymore?  _ Grecian pillars stand tall and elegant, intricate carvings decorate its body as if to protest the fate of the tragedies their namesakes are so famed for. The marble floors are carpeted in an ostentatiously lavish blood red. Fitting really, for their line of work. A pretty portrait of the Virgin Mary is no doubt the centerpiece, the baby blue hues and the cream whites seem misplaced in a room of such avarice. It stands as a stark contrast to the ritzy gold baroque detailing that line the walls. She’s the epitome of chastity, innocence and virtue and she’s meant to compliment the grandeur of the ballroom. It isn’t to say it works.

Seungyoun scoffs at how satirical it seems to be. No matter how much they try to retreat behind the resplendence, nothing can hide the true dilapidation beneath the facades. It is but a simulacrum of piety. They are well aware of it themselves. 

Seungyoun included. 

A waiter offers him a flute of champagne in passing. It tastes acerbic, his tongue stings. He knows for a fact it costs more than the sum of everything he owns. He doesn’t carry much with him, he doesn’t keep much. The jade pendant around his neck burns hot like a fire band against his chest. Too much leaves a paper trail. He couldn’t have that. He couldn’t afford to get caught. 

His eyes scale the four corners of the room. He’s taken aback when he notices a lean figure cloaked in sophistication. Not much takes his breath away anymore, but he finds the air escape his lungs. 

He knows who Han Seungwoo is, murmurs of his efficiency, of his ruthlessness, it’s no surprise he’s one of the most adept in this field of work. He looks the part, he plays the part, he is a manifestation of the part. Seungyoun himself doesn’t pale in comparison, not with his count in such little time. 

He’s standing in front of the double doored bay windows that overlook the pavillion below. The sky is starless, a blank sheet of blue black. The backdrop seems to accentuate the ebony of Seungwoo’s no doubt expensively tailored suit. The moon acts as an opal beacon, responsible for the slivers of an illusion of silver to appear as parts of the kaleidoscope in strands of his hair. The glow it casts is ethereal, though he supposes Seungwoo would look gorgeous either way. He’s never met him before, not in the flesh. Yet he’s already entranced. Seungwoo sees him staring. His upper lips quirks to the right, something inexplicable dances in his irises. Seungyoun returns his grin with an impish one of his own. 

Han Seungwoo stands in a tuxedo of black and white, black and white like one of the old film stars his mom used to love watching. He wonders if she still loves him. Seungyoun, not the film star. He chastises himself, now isn’t the time for those kinds of thoughts. 

Seungyoun wears one of his own, it stretches taut over his broad shoulders. He knows it fits him well, much as he knows his looks service him well in this industry. As it will today.

A lady walks past him in a gown of midnight blue embellished with accents of diamonds as if to substitute the lack of stars. He knows this lady, he’s surveyed her the whole time. The night sky looked more majestic, the figure before it even more effortlessly so. Still, his eyes trail after her instead. It is his job after all. 

“Ms. Meier?” Seungyoun croons. His hand reaches out, by now a trained reflex to rest at the bend of her elbow. Not restraining, just enough to gather her attention. 

She turns. Her makeup is impeccable, silky hair sleek as Rumpelstiltskin’s spun gold. There isn’t a single flyaway in the fancy chignon she’s sporting. Everything about her should be warm. Except, her eyes are a chilling ice grey. The windows to the soul. She looks Seungyoun over, once, twice, thrice. He notices how her gaze turns to one of appraisal. It’s minute; but it’s what he’s been trained to deduce. She smiles. He knew she would. 

“I must say, you look absolutely radiant today.” Her eyes glaze over, cheeks flaming red. What else would be red soon?

How long would it take? He decides to give himself a challenge. Ten minutes. 

She follows him into a concealed storage room in the west wing in  _ five _ .

_ Six,  _ and he’s nosing along her jawline, pressing bruising kisses along her neck.

A moment and he unsheathes his dagger and plunges it into her side. It’s meticulous, as bloodless as possible. He watches her take her last breath, leaving the knife buried in her gut and her, or rather what was a her, lying motionless on the floor. 

He had three minutes left over. 

He licks his lips. They’re a little chapped.

_ 26 & counting… _

_ xxx _

Zurich is white. Not quite a blank slate, more so an empty canvas. His footsteps crunch against the frosty alabaster that coats the asphalt streets. It’s irrational but he fears the imprints he leaves behind. He tells himself they’ll disappear in an hour or two when a fresh layer of snowfall erases all traces of him having ever been here. Back into the shadows he goes, back into the obsidian of anonymity. 

He doesn’t know what they did, he doesn’t know who they got mad. He doesn’t care, doesn’t even want to know. It’s easier when he sees them as numbers in his bank account. It’s what he tells himself at least. Say it enough and it becomes a placebo. He can’t help that these people are the collateral damage to his own problems. Well, he can, but he wants to believe instead that they’re on his list for all the right reasons; that they’re evil, reprobates far beyond Heaven’s grace. He’s selfish like that, it’s a truth he’d finally come to accept only just a couple moons ago. He bartered in lives, was it playing God that he put his families’ above everyone else’s? He wishes it weren’t the case, but we all have demons we could and would never be able to face headfirst. He pulls his hood up tighter and continues his trek towards a new manila folder. You do what you have to to survive. It’s ingrained into human instinct - rhetorics we can never truly escape. 

A bloodhound whines in the distance. He’s being followed.

“Long night?” It’s a drawl, languid as it dances across his tongue. A lean figure ascends into the light from the alleyway. For a second he briefly wonders if Thanatos has come to collect as divine retribution. He looks like a God.

“Nights never end.” Seungyoun responds after a beat. 

“Not in this line of work I suppose.” He smiles.

Seungyoun lets himself look, his own eyes tracing the outlines of his frame, surveying the way he twirls an unlit cigarette between his thumb and his index finger. If David was a sculpture, Seungwoo is art. Every last feature is chiseled and chipped to absolute perfection. Thick lashes flutter over high cheekbones. Deep-set eyes of charcoal seem to shift with the fluidity of the most potent ink. A tall nose bridge rounds into a smaller pinched tip. His lips are thin, a garish pink reminiscent of rosebuds in May. It melts the biting frigidity of the wind. Straight lines and hard angles dominate, yet the subtlety of pillowy cheeks and dimpled smiles seems to snake in the spaces between. 

He lights the cigarette and brings it to his lips. Slow and sensual. It sparks to life, something scarce among these dim street corners. In hindsight, Seungyoun thinks sometimes, on the good days, this was the moment he knew. The cigarette was in actuality a blazing inferno. Perhaps Dante was pulling the strings, all Seungyoun knows is like a moth too close to a flame, he’d been burned. White light, incineration - the lot. Wolf in sheep’s clothing. But he supposes that goes for all of them.

He only wishes he wasn’t the one to fall first. The ball drops. The first to feel is the first to lose. No, that’s paradoxical. In this game there are no victors. Only survivors of which Seungyoun wasn’t. He’d given away his heart, signed, sealed and delivered. The outcome was broken fragments marked in bold crimson: “returned to sender”. 

Seungyoun’s own hands itch, restless as he stares entranced at the glowing tip of Seungwoo’s cigarette. 

“Want one?”

“Those things will kill you.”

Seungwoo does a laugh. “You say it as if killing is something foreign.” 

Seungyoun doesn’t respond. Something twists in his side. A sore spot - in more ways than one.  _ Others? No. Myself? Far from it. That’s the only reason I’m trapped in this shindig.  _

Seungwoo hums into the silence, it fills the alley. A small smile plays at the corner of his lips as if knows a secret he refuses to share. “Where you off to next?” he asks. His question sounds innocent, but Seungyoun has long since learned that sincerity didn’t exist in this profession. 

“What do you want?” He says instead. He means for it to come out a little accusatory. Time is money, time is bidding and time is something he didn’t have. 

Seungwoo rolls his eyes and takes a long inhale. Seungyoun watches the smoke leave his lips, curling in wispy ringlets before disappearing into the darkness.

“Can’t a guy talk to a handsome stranger without getting their motives questioned?” It’s so practiced, Seungyoun almost falls for it. Almost. He gives it a second, lets himself bask in the complement, he even lets himself imagine an alternate universe where it could be pure candor before he pulls his head out of the clouds and grounds himself in the feel of the glock that lay tucked at his side. He fingers the shaft. 

“I’m not one of your marks, you can drop the act.”

“Act? Whoever said anything about an act?” The way he smiles gets his blood rushing. Gushing down, down, down to parts he’d be smart to ignore. 

Control is key, control is key.  _ Listen to me.  _ Control is key. 

He presses his lips into a hard line, they’re part of the same organization, he supposes it’s alright. Anything to get Seungwoo to stop looking at him with  _ those  _ eyes. 

“Taiwan.” 

Seungwoo hums, twiddling the thin cylinder with his long, nimble fingers. Seungyoun stifles his thoughts from wandering to what other things those pretty fingers could do. 

“I’ve been there. Off to see the Lee’s?” 

“They’ve got a job for me.”

Seungwoo takes a step closer. 

“The Taiwanese faction mean business.” His nose crinkles and Seungyoun sees Seungwoo’s eyes scan the extremities of his face, trailing ever so slowly from his eyes, nose, lips. Lingering ever so slightly on the latter it’s almost unnoticeable. Had it not been Seungyoun it’s likely it would have gone unnoticeable. But it is him, and Seungwoo knows it too. 

“I’m familiar with how they function.” Heat rushes to his face, splotchy red pinpricks of an emotion Seungyoun had so long suppressed. He can’t tell if it’s the numbing cold or-

Seungwoo grins and his teeth are just the slightest bit crooked yet somehow the imperfection seems to exemplify the perfection. “I don’t doubt you do.” He’s still staring and Seungyoun wishes he would stop, a fleet of little tremors threaten the foundation of his man-made armour. 

Seungwoo takes a final drag. And a step. There’s a glint to his irises, a pretty ribbon of light that encircles the black and Seungyoun is  _ oh so  _ fixated that he doesn’t notice how close they are till he feels Seungwoo whisper against the dip of his Cupid’s bow. 

“Maybe I’ll see you there,  _ rookie. _ ” 

Seungyoun can feel his breath brush against his, entwined in the scant inches in between rosy lips. Normally he’d bristle at the implications but this time he does no such thing. As Seungwoo retracts, the oxygen returns to Seungyoun’s lungs and the faraway haze subsides leaving only an illusory hypnosis of a man possessed as he calls out,

“Wait!” He doesn’t recognise his own voice.

“Yes,  _ Seungyoun _ ?” Seungwoo turns and his gaze is hooded - from the way his eyelids fold over to the way his pupils dilate in the shine of the twilight. It all epitomizes alluring. His voice is gravelly yet in the most contrasting of cacophonies like honey, sickly sweet and Seungyoun hums at how his name leaves his plush pink lips. He wants his hands, rough on him as buttons come unraveled and hair is tousled but he holds back, stands stoic in his spot as he stares at the most beautiful specimen his mortal eyes had ever laid themselves upon standing less than a foot away from him. 

He’s candy coated misery and Seungyoun knows but still, he feels the fatigue seep through his bones, he doesn’t want to be alone anymore -it’s almost defeatist how he thinks there can be nothing more miserable than this. He wants a reprieve in a way that only Seungwoo can give him in this exact moment. The way he looks, his demeanor - everything. He wants it all. His nerve receptors are going berserk, as if they’ve been shot with a concentration of dopamine and Seungyoun doesn’t quite remember the last time his heart seemed to be so short on stamina, a chaotic thumping of irregular beats - arbitrary, unpredictable; it’s something reminiscent of the old Seungyoun. He should’ve hated it, he’d tried so hard to erase the traces yet somehow, it’s tantalizing, he can’t stop, he revels in it. 

“Let’s go somewhere, you and me.”

He wants to live with reckless abandon, he wants to be free. It breaks every rule he’s set for himself when he chose this path to tread upon, it makes no sense that he’d give it up for one person. But something in him longs for a semblance of permanence and the glint of defiance Seungwoo carries himself with in such a systematic profession seems to personify the basis of what Seungyoun has craved for the three years since he left his old life. He’s not so delusional that he believes any of this will last past a casual fuck-  _ no,  _ but he stops the voice of reason in the back of his mind. Maybe it’s unhealthy but he’ll let himself imagine that this could blossom into something more. Just for tonight, just for the couple hours between the sweat soaked bed sheets of pay-per-hour motels he will let their story be written in the obnoxious cursive of pink neon signs.

Seungwoo smiles. 

There’s something carnal in the way Seungyoun grabs at Seungwoo’s collar. It’s so clumsy, a direct juxtaposition of everything he was supposed to be. When their lips meet it’s soft at first, a quiet locking of lips as if handcrafted by the most talented of blacksmiths, he’s content with the pace. He feels as if he’s thirteen again, sitting on the playground as his classmates spin the empty coca cola canister waiting in innocent glee for the bottleneck to name its next victim. When Seungwoo tugs at Seungyoun’s waist and the kiss becomes more urgent, the swift gradation is all the more gratifying as Seungyoun clings onto Seungwoo as if he were the only solid thing left in the swirling vastness of the universe. His mouth is insistent as he parts his lips with a shaky breath. A tingle runs from every nerve ending and hands move up and down spines, goosebumps attacking every inch of flesh as he lets himself get caught up in the chilling heat of it all. Wet kisses decorate the junction leading down necks as guttural groans encompass the entirety of the dingy alleyway, filling the non-existent space between bodies flushed tight against one another. Light nips paint purple blue constellations on collarbones Seungyoun could spend all of eternity admiring. It feels beautiful, like a comet that skims the stratosphere, or even the dazzling brightness of the aurora borealis. Everything seems to have boiled down to this moment and Seungyoun lets himself get lost in the beauty of nature, the beauty of Seungwoo and the temporary escapade of bodily comforts.

Seungwoo drops the bud and the glow fizzles out as ash dots the snow.

The canvas is stained. Tainted by footprints that leave impresses of a cardinal vermillion. There is no purity, he doubts there’d ever been any. Maybe way back when the only shades of red he was familiar with was smiling mouths and hand picked strawberries from the berry groves in his hometown. Something else coats his hands now. He can assure it’s less sweet. It’s coppery with a stench of burning and the most bitter of aftertastes. Yet he pays it no mind, he only feels one thing.

**Author's Note:**

> this has been abandoned in my wips for a really long time and i have about another 4k written already but i really have to workshop it because it's just bits and pieces of scenes i want to write so i figured posting the first bit would force me to pick it up again
> 
> this is a little self indulgent and hella melodramatic bc it stemmed from me toying around with my writing style... the subject matter is also a bit sketch maybe? i'm not sure? 
> 
> let me know what you thought? if it was too much? i'm also on twt @2seungyulcat come look for me! <333


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